Now that it’s been confirmed that Bethesda are tightly focused on “Fallout 4” and “Dishonored 2”, this leaves little room for “The Elder Scrolls 6” in their development schedule. Many players were hoping that the game would be announced at some point soon, but now this seems highly unlikely. In fact, some reports about the possible release date claim that the game won’t be out by at least 2018, although the studio is likely going to use its development time to its full potential.
This development isn’t all that surprising as the studio is known for their tightly limited development resources when it comes to major titles like that. Or rather, they have lots of resources but they also have a large area to cover and their games almost always end up needing additional polish by the time they’re released.
Thankfully, the studio has a very active modding community supporting them and releasing unofficial patches full of bug fixes and gameplay improvements, which has allowed Bethesda to focus on creating a tight, thrilling story and solid gameplay, letting players take care of the small quirks. At the same time, this makes it pretty obvious that handling two major titles like “Fallout 4” and “The Elder Scrolls 6” would be an insurmountable task for them, so it makes perfect sense that the next “TES” game is not going to be ready anytime soon.
In fact, some fans have even been questioning the 2018 prediction, calling it too brave and unreasonable if the studio puts out another title next year or so. Of course, we don’t know anything about their schedule in this regard, although it’s possible that they also have other minor projects in the background that they are getting ready to release.
In the meantime, they have been talking about “Fallout 4” and the studio’s huge enthusiasm towards it. According to reports, the game is going to be the most ambitious title developed by the studio to date, and they have been putting huge amounts of effort into polishing it properly. They even seem convinced that the game is going to top everything they’ve released so far, which of course sounds quite exciting to “Fallout” fans and Bethesda’s fans in general, but players also have a few things on their minds regarding the studio’s development style.
In particular, the bigger a game gets, the more work will be required to ensure that it’s polished properly – and as we know very well, Bethesda have a few problems with that. We have no idea if “Fallout 4” is being tested in a different way than previous games that came out from the studio, but it would certainly be a good idea to test it more actively in order to ensure that it matches the standards of development that gamers have come to expect. Especially after the recent fiasco with the Steam Workshop for “Skyrim” which placed the future of some mods under question.
The problem is that Bethesda and Valve are planning to eventually monetize mods for these games – and that could significantly alter the community with regards to unofficial patches and community bug fixes. It might completely kill off this type of work as fans will see no sense in developing these sorts of things if nobody gets to use them for free. On the other hand, it has also raised some questions of ethics issues within the community.